Eclipse Reorganizes Into Independent Entity

The Eclipse Foundation is in the process of setting up a new board, selecting an executive director and establishing product roadmaps.

ANAHEIM, Calif.The Eclipse Board of Stewards Monday announced Eclipses reorganization into a not-for-profit corporation known as the Eclipse Foundation.
The organization initially formed after IBM released the Java-based Eclipse Platform into the open-source community, Eclipse is now an independent body that will drive the platforms evolution to benefit the providers of software development offerings and end users. The announcement came at the first annual EclipseCon conference here.

The new organization is in the process of setting up its new board, selecting an executive director and establishing roadmaps for projects under way. Foundation officials said Eclipse has established a board of directors drawn from four classes of membership: Strategic Developers, Strategic Consumers, Add-in Providers and Open Source project leaders. Strategic Developers and Strategic Consumers hold seats on this board, as do representatives elected by Add-in Providers and Open Source project leaders. Strategic Developers, Strategic Consumers and Add-in Providers contribute annual dues. The founding Strategic Developers and Strategic Consumers are Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Intel Corp., MontaVista Software, QNX, SAP AG and Serena Software. In the coming weeks, the board will announce its selection of a full-time executive director to lead the Eclipse management organization.

Eclipse spokesman Skip McGaughey, former chairman of the organization and an IBM employee, in a statement said, "This is a significant step forward in the evolution of Eclipse. For the open source development community, were establishing a strong support base that will strengthen the projects and expand a powerful reusable architecture. This creates long-term opportunities for reuse, interoperation and innovation that enable both providers and consumers to take development tool technology to the next level in functionality integration and usability."
"We believe that the new independent entity will make Eclipse much stronger, more open and more customer-focused," said Rich Main, director of Java development environments for SAS Institute Inc., of Cary, N.C., and an Eclipse member. "Because of Eclipses importance as a Java development environment, this can only serve to make the whole Java platform stronger."
Next page: Independence an "important step."

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.